Infinity and the Mind of Mingus
Mingus was massive. What else can I say? He was an ocean, not a man. He is the fountain not even trying to contain. His music never seems to reach a balance, as it swings from manic energy and agitation, music constantly fighting itself from within, to a deeper peace and knowledge - that never lasts. The point being that it swings.
That Mingus ought to be regarded amongst the greats of composition is the essential argument made in the first comprehensive documentary on his life, Triumph of the Underdog, directed by Don McGlynn (past credits include documentaries on the Mills Brothers, Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper). The influence of music as wide ranging as Jelly Roll Morton, Indian music, Spanish music, Charlie Parker, 19th century classical, and Schoenberg is noted, but "it's all blended together, sublimated, so it comes out Mingus," says conductor Gunther Schuller in one clip.
"Pithecanthropus Erectus," the first Mingus song I ever heard, sounds like the truth of evolution. It follows a pattern that is more like resolve, rupture, indecision, and collapse, then a new stronger resolution, followed by a bigger collapse. With Mingus, cataclysm is essential to evolution - Beneath The Underdog should perhaps have been titled Lost and Found and Lost Again, and his compositions mirror the man. He goes through lifetimes, through centuries, through geological time periods, in four minutes of a song. There's sections no longer than a bar that would take a lifetime to notate. Mingus once said, "In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time." Or else in another interview, "If the music's not sincere, then I'm not here."
We all go to war with ourselves, long before countries go to war. And America is mostly populated by this self-created refugee -- amongst the greatest of its abject is Mingus. Born of a father half black, half Swedish, a mother half black, half Chinese -- a mother who died when he was 20 months old. Raised by a stepmother, whose relationship with his father was best described as 'war.' Mingus, our man, grows up, unaccepted by the black community, yet black in the eyes of the white man - "conking his hair like a Mexican," finding comfort with a Japanese friend, but generally remaining all alone in the world. "I was a kind of wise man as old as time," writes Mingus, reflecting on his childhood. This smart young man finds out pretty quick that something ain't right, something ain't right. "Maybe lovers have to be con artists on this poor earth, to convince each other that such a wonderful thing can exist," his girl Lee Marie would say to him.
In another person, and I don't want to say a lesser person, but a person of less mental size, impacts are felt less - in a great mind, these disturbances bang harder and faster, almost exploding. It would be an understatement to say that Mingus had a presence. "His personality ran like the color spectrum, from hot to cold, from beautiful to - you take it from there," says saxophone player John Handy. Schuller said he could be "as sweet and calm as a two month old baby, and two minutes later he could explode like Vesuvius." His wife Sue, who was with him until the end, said he was just "trying to test people to see how far they could go." There's a million Mingus legends. Jimmy Knepper recounts being punched in the mouth after refusing to help Mingus write backing music for the 1962 Town Hall Concert. In an incident which director McGlynn describes as Rashomon-like, because everyone who was there seems to have a different version of the story, Mingus got kicked out of Duke Ellington's big band after a brawl with Juan Tizol during a performance. Mingus was the only person who Duke ever kicked out of his band, and Duke was Mingus' all-time hero.
"It couldn't have been good for him," says McGlynn. "A friend of mine met Charles in the '60s, and he was having dinner with Duke -- Charles came in, you know, like hunched over, and in awe, and didn't quite know how to behave around Duke, and Duke was saying, 'Calm down Mingus, just sit down, and join us.' And Mingus was like, 'Oh no, no.'" But when Mingus after a stint in a mental hospital (that he checked himself into) in the late-'60s, retires from music - he's shown in the movie walking around East Village with 12 cameras during this period - it is Duke that is instrumental in bringing Mingus back.
Mingus had a fair share of ups and downs, and nowhere is an episode of the downs shown more clearly than in a mid-'60s documentary called Mingus. "It was sort of a Day In the Life Of..., and it happened to be one of his worst days," says McGlynn. There's one particular shot so haunting - on the edge of insanity, losing the plot, the look in his eyes is so powerful - never in my life have I seen such -
"Complete desperation," says McGlynn. "Even though I really think that's a very fine movie and I like it very much, one thing I was hoping to do with this documentary was to be a little broader about his life. 'Cause this was basically shot the day or two with him performing, and a day or two when he was being evicted. It was very specific to that event. And I wanted to tell more of his life story, and also to show that he wasn't always desperate and at the end of his rope, that there were other different aspects of his personality that came out at different times in his life. That's another thing about the movie. I didn't want to just dwell on the belligerent and violent side of him, the confrontational side. I wanted to deal with the fact that he was very romantic, and also very political, and also extremely funny. I wanted to show that he had all these different character traits, and these things came out in the music."
Mingus rebounds in the early '70s. Money is coming in. He is more loved and widely acknowledged than he has ever been. And then, out of nowhere, he's diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, more famously known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Months to live, he is moved into a high-rise apartment with a great view over the city and the river. In the movie's most beautiful moment, the camera pans 270 degrees of the view - the sky with that bluish-purple color that it sometimes gets after sunset but before dark, traffic moves up and down the streets, and a tape recording of Mingus in his final months, no longer able to control his hands well enough to play bass or piano, singing a Joni Mitchell song into a dictaphone. This is a man who had music so deep in his blood, whose very soul was music, and music is forged from eternity. After he dies in 1979, Sue scatters his ashes in the River Ganges. Where better?
"I have worked and I have produced music that has not been played and I have written words that have not been read," these cryptic words Mingus once wrote. They might have been his Epitaph.
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